Small-scale chambers advantages

In Fig. 2.1-1, the general arrangement of an environmental test chamber is shown. Basically, two types of environmental test chambers can be distinguished small scale chambers with volumes ranging from a few litres to a few cubic metres, and room-size large scale chambers of the walk-in type. Both types of chambers have advantages as well as disadvantages (see Table 2.1-1) (EC, 1989). 

Table 2.1-1. Advantages and disadvantages of small and large scale chambers (EC, 1989).

In principle, flow photolysis is not limited to microfluidic devices. Also larger perfusion chambers could be used. However, microdevices have the advantage that only small amounts of the expensive caged compounds are required to carry out the stimulation experiments. Moreover, excellent control of flow properties is easily obtained on the length scale of individual cells. 

The advantages of this type of chromatographic separation are speed (most systems require less than one hour development time), sharpness of separation (there is frequently less tailing of spots than on paper), the fact that results can often be applied to column separation on a preparative scale, the small size of chromatographic chambers used which makes for more rapid equilibration and uses less bench space and, in particular, the possibility of using corrosive spray reagents such as strong sulphuric and phosphoric acids. 

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